The Centipede
Floyd "The Centipede" Bergson 'is a former Canadian military officer turned temporal-powered supervillain. He wields the incredible metamorphic power of The Q-Dial. Personality Sociopathic, calculating, methodical, big-picture, somewhere along the way The Centipede crossed the line from black-ops assassin to behind-the-scenes mastermind after suffering a few too many indignities for his country. He would rather not be "customer facing," preferring instead to affiliate himself as a "henchman" to a bigger gun so long as it benefits his long-term goals, though he doesn't shy away from a fight. He is also ferociously determined, facing cosmic elements and impossible odds with gritted teeth and an unshakable drive to get precisely what he wants. Initially, he thought of himself as doing the right thing by any means necessary, but after he discovered that H-Dials would not work for him, he realized he was actually a ''villain, and dove into that persona with an icy gusto. Appearance Tall, slender, with the build of a martial artist and a highly-honed athlete, The Centipede is in his physical prime despite being middle-aged. His black hair is greyed around the temples, his eyes are piercing grey-blue, and he tends to wear simple blue suits with single-colored ties. Occasionally, he wears a centipede-styled helmet that gives him broad-spectrum HD visual acuity enhancement, transceiver capabilities, and taser-mandibles. Abilities Floyd has extensive training in martial arts and wetworks, including firearms, demolitions, and communications. He has knowledge of military operations and is able to navigate bureaucracy well enough to circumvent it and undermine it from within. He has experienced vast dimensional journeys and is capable of compartmentalizing and processing such information without perceptible psychological strain. The Centipede comes from a world filled with superhumans, and has contingency training that allows him to hold his own against such beings. He has performed some amount of research into the mysterious transformative Dials littered across The Omniverse/Hypertime, though even he admits that he's barely scratched the surface. He can use certain Dials, but their internal mechanics thus far elude him. Powers The Centipede has the ability to spaciotemporally multi-locate, allowing him to pluck possible versions of himself out of his immediate future and essentially duplicate himself in vast quantities in realtime-- a literal one-man army. The duplicates work together seamlessly, but are not linked in such a way that the death or injury of one or more affects the others to a perceptible degree. Essentially this means he can create functionally unlimited cannon fodder to throw at whomever he's up against, and so long as one of him survives, he can keep trying-- allowing him to exhaust even odds stacked vastly against him. Another aspect of his temporal powers gives him speed at low-superhuman levels. He also appears to have some measure of strength and injury resistance-- he took a punch to the face from a former boxer then a full taser shock at the back of his neck and stayed standing, functional, and remained conscious and capable even having been smacked away by a superstrong hero only moments later. The full extent of this resilience has not been revealed, and may be partly due to his training and nearly-indomitable will. Equipment The Centipede is the wielder of The Q-Dial (short for Qued Dial; also known as an E-Dial for Evil Dial; or a V-Dial for Villain Dial), created for him by the extradimensional madman known as "O," The Lost Operator. While H-Dials allow people of a heroic spirit to become seemingly random superheroes, The Q-Dial allows its villainous Dialer to become seemingly random supervillains by copying an existing supervillain elsewhere in hypertime and layering their power and personality template (or "ectype") onto the Dialer for a short but indeterminate period. The Dial is a circular device resembling the rotary dial of old-fashioned telephones, in which one can select numbers (and their corresponding letters) by inserting their finger and turning it around the full circle, letting it spring back for them to dial the following number. The Centipede activates his Dial by dialing Q-U-E-D or "qued," an Old English word meaning "bad" or "evil." He then temporarily becomes a supervillain seemingly by random chance for a brief time, though he can sometimes reverse the transformation prematurely by "reverse-dialing," or by dialing D-E-U-Q. Most horrifying of all, if The Centipede uses his Q-Dial in conjunction with his ability to temporally duplicate himself, each of his selves will possess a Q-Dial and each will be able to become a different supervillain. In mere instants, The Centipede can become vast armies of powered foes working together for a common purpose. On occasion, The Centipede will use the helmet mentioned above, which enhances his visual range and targeting capabilities, provides radio transceiver communications, and taser electroshocks in the mandibles. The Centipede also possesses peak human competence in the use of a wide array of firearms and other military equipment. Weaknesses Despite the vast, near-depthless resources of his duplication ability, each of The Centipede's bodies is not substantially less vulnerable to injury or death than a normal human, so they can be killed or wounded or taken down-- with varying degrees of effort. The Q-Dial, while based on incomprehensibly advanced extradimensional technology, is not unerring-- and if The Centipede or any of his duplicates are separated from their respective Q-Dial, they will not be able to Dial it and access its powers. Presumably, as The Centipede's power is based out of a temporal anomaly, these abilities might be redirected or circumvented by a person with temporal manipulation powers, such as a Chronosapien or a Celestialsapien. He can also be somewhat countered by another being with functionally similar duplication abilities, such as a Splixson or a Sonorosian. Biography Pre-Horizon The Operators once occupied a place at the heart of The New 52 DC Multiverse, a civilization known as The Hub or The Exchange. Using their incredible Dial technology, they would copy objects, powers, whatever they needed from elsewhere in the multiverse... except they didn't always just copy. Sometimes they stole. And after some time... the multiverse realized what was happening, and staged an uprising against The Operators, a war on The Exchange. Some time during this war, one of The Operators, known now simply as "O," went absolutely mad and detonated an impossibly powerful bomb to destroy the enemies of The Exchange before his fellow Operators could stop him and try to restore peace. In so doing, he wiped out the rest of The Operators, and scattered both himself and countless broken Dials across hypertime. These would litter the Earths in this Multiverse and the countless dimensions in between, and Dials would quietly insert themselves into the technology and mythology of those worlds, hidden away and waiting to be found. Native to Earth 0 of that multiverse, Floyd Bergson was a soldier and a spy in service of the Canadian government who participated in a time travel experiment. The time machine went wrong, and instead gave Floyd the metahuman abilities described above-- to near-endlessly duplicate himself like a ripple in the timestream. He became a primary black ops agent in an off-books division known as Dark Maple, and became a vital boots-on-the-ground field operator (heh) in their attempts to harness and weaponize Dials to make Canadian super-soldiers. Having clashed with a couple of American civilian Hero Dialers, The Centipede discovered that he was not... compatible... with their H-Dials, which by extension meant that he was a villain. Spinning out of this, The Centipede embraced this newfound identity, and sold his soul to get to The Exchange across unimaginable interdimensional gulfs and get The Lost Operator to create him a Villain Dial that would work for him-- the Q-Dial. Alongside "O," The Centipede did battle in the heart of The Exchange with a loose-knit misfit cadre of heroic Dialers called The Dial Bunch, at which point he was defeated and separated from his Dial. Somehow since, he has recovered The Q-Dial... but he has again found himself cast across universes... and has awakened in The Horizon. Floyd Bergson, Welcome to Horizon Floyd awakened in '''The Great Spiral, on a planet he has since named Myriapoda. Bewildered by his appearance, he used his powers to explore every scrap of the world he could reach. It seemed... largely Earthlike, with some seriously exotic fauna, but was devoid of any sapient life or civilization. So he... became the civilization. Finding that some mysterious force (The Horizon's Pull) prevented him from using any of his more cosmically-empowered Dialed villains from returning to The Exchange or even to his original home Earth-- speedsters couldn't vibrate away, Apokoliptians couldn't use Boom Tubes to escape --he instead built cities on this world populated entirely with himself. At some point, he is hoping to harness his Q-Dial and cannibalize it into a Jump Dial in hopes that this will have enough power to get free of The Pull... ...and as with anything he sets his mind to, nothing, no force or entity or moral compunction will stand in his way. Trivia * Floyd "The Centipede" Bergson was created by China Miéville for his New 52 DC Comic "Dial H," which rebooted and incorporated elements of the "Dial H for Hero" franchise dating back to 1966 with the original appearance of Robby Reed in House of Mystery #196, created by Dave Wood and Jim Mooney. All credit is due the original creators from then to now.